Content curation is the act of sharing interesting, relevant information about a topic, and it adds to your credibility when it’s done right. When it’s done incorrectly, lackluster results are the best you can expect. However, applying insider knowledge about your field of expertise moves you ahead of the crowd on social media. It shows your expertise and helps your site’s content rise in search engine results when you zero in on a subject and share quality information about it.

When Should Marketers Use Content Curation?

Share your curated content when you don’t have content ready to share, like days you aren’t publishing on your site. This lets you stick to a posting schedule while only investing a fraction of the time it takes to prepare new content.

Another time to share this type of information is when you need to gain exposure in your field or when you need to fill gaps in your own expertise. For example, you may not know a lot about a specific type of widget but you can share a quote about that widget from someone who knows everything about it.

Curated content also helps to increase organic indexing, because sharing more information means you’re putting more links to your site on the web. It’s also a technique that helps stretch your marketing budget a bit farther.

Reasons to Curate Content

This type of social sharing and linking complements your content marketing efforts. It helps you identify what type of content interests your audience without spending the money to create the content yourself. The things you value about your product or service may not be the things that spark the most interest among your customers.

Linking to well-known experts in your industry within content moves your site into their neighborhood. This can be compared to getting settled in a new community in the physical world where no one knows you and taking on volunteer work with a local charity. It can take a while to be recognized in the community, depending on how much you publish and put yourself out there. You’ll know it’s working, though, when people start to see you in and around the neighborhood and recognize you as an active leader in the community.

Benefits of Content Curation

Sharing things created by other experts on social media helps to stretch your content creation budget by giving you fresh information to share. It’s a quick and easy way to maintain engagement with your followers. It also establishes you as a news source, so when your followers want to know what’s new in your industry, they come to you first instead of searching the internet.

3 Effective Ways to Use Content Curation

There are numerous ways to engage in this type of marketing, and three especially useful ways are:

Relationship building: Get a quote from another industry leader, and share it with your followers. This shows respect and can form a foundation for building a relationship with your fellow expert.

Information sources: Content from credible sources can be used as a source for your site’s content.

Data sources for infographics:infographics are especially useful for calling out numerical data you want to share. An infographic makes it easy for your followers to check out and assimilate the information. Just be sure to credit the original source and add value when creating it.

Content Curation in Practice

Apply the 80/20 rule of social media to your content curation efforts when posting on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter. Aim for creating 20 percent of your content to put your business in a unique position among competitors. Then curate around 80 percent of the content from others, along with your thoughts on the curated content. You may have to adjust the mix a bit to find out exactly what works for your company, but keeping the 80/20 rule in mind helps you balance promoting your business while showing respect for your colleagues and for your audience.

Using Curated Content to Engage Customers

There’s a reason social media is so popular. People want more than just one-sided content to read or watch. People want a conversation and a social experience, and you can use curated content to start a conversation.

Go beyond simply sharing links to curated content. Be sure to add your own voice and include your thoughts about the content you’re sharing. If all you do is post a link on a social media site, it may show you have an interest in the topic, but it probably won’t stimulate conversation or generate much interest with your followers.

Things to Avoid When Curating Content

There are some things you need to avoid when using this technique. An ill-planned approach could potentially alienate your followers.

Try to avoid things like:

Not knowing your audience: Research the things that the specific platforms value before sharing. For example, you wouldn’t want to share your favorite Renaissance-era poetry in a funny cat meme group if you’re looking for positive engagement.

Sharing without carefully reading: Sharing random content you find about your topic without reading it and fact-checking can make you look bad if the information turns out to be incorrect.

Promoting the competition: Sharing content from direct competitors can potentially send your customers to the competition.

Being dull when sharing: Simply sharing a title or link, with no added value from you, only gives your followers what they could get from a quick internet search. When you add your thoughts on the link, it adds excitement that can lead to better engagement.

Content curation can add to the workload for a content marketing team, but there’s a cost-effective way to manage it. Browse through our resources about content curation and consider hiring the content marketing experts at CopyPress to help with your company’s needs in this area. Using content marketing experts frees your key marketing personnel to focus on other tasks. They will not need to dedicate hours to learning new procedures, plus you can count on it being done right the first time.

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